


Take Me Back to the Start

by agenderleadingplayer



Category: Spring Awakening - Sheik/Sater
Genre: Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Modern Era, Oneshot, idek what to tag this, kinda??? it was a oneshot but i got carried away, like it's SUPER implied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-09 21:10:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5555477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agenderleadingplayer/pseuds/agenderleadingplayer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hanschen hasn't seen Ernst Robel in years, and is sure he's never seeing him again, realizing too late how much Ernst means to him.</p>
<p>Too late, that is, until he finds him again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take Me Back to the Start

**Author's Note:**

> idek this was gonna be a oneshot but then i wrote a lot
> 
> title from "the scientist" by coldplay (a very hernst song i don't recommend it if you don't like pain)

The first thing he notices is his heart racing – the thumping and pounding in his chest that doesn't seem to go away. He reaches a shaking hand up to touch his forehead; he's sweating, and he's cold.    
  
But at least it's morning.    
  
Sometimes, the terrors wake him up at ungodly hours – three, three-thirty, four. He'd be able to ignore them if they only weren't all about the same thing.   
  
There will be nights where he wakes up and his heart is beating fast, too fast, and his lungs will be heaving and the only sound that's able to escape his lips is a name. But it always comes too late – the dream is over.    
  
Ernst is gone.    
  
Hanschen forces himself to get up, put on his work clothes, get out the door. The morning is brisk, as it usually is this time of year, and the chill is a welcome distraction to the tears that threaten to spill from his eyes. Waking up from these dreams has never been easy.

He’ll see people in the future – doctors, therapists – who ask when the dreams started. He’ll never be able to answer. “Maybe they were always there,” is his rote response. It will seem to be a sufficient answer for the doctors at least. They’ll never prod him about it again.

Work is, for the most part, boring. The only part he looks forward to on any given day is when new evidence is sent in for cases, and that has no chance of happening anytime soon, as he’s currently at a standstill in the middle of a long civil case. (Not even a fun one, Hanschen enjoys muttering often; a car thing. All the cases in this goddamn law firm and he got stuck with a  _ car thing _ .)

Four or five hours pass with relatively nothing new, and he heads out the door to lunch, walking the block or so down to a small, nondescript cafè, swinging the door open as he had every lunch period before this. He was starting to get bored of this place.

The chairs are mismatched and there are plates hung on the walls. A lot of people are speaking French, he even hears some English; this corner of Munich has always attracted more foreigners, it seemed. 

He doesn't order right away, chooses a table instead, and watches, toying with the slight uncertain air of the place. Business was never fast, but, he supposed, fast enough to keep them in business.

The June sunlight streamed in from large windows on one end of the place, providing just enough of a view of the sidewalk to people-watch, a pastime Hanschen is privy to when the line is long and the wifi is slow. 

People pass him slowly, muttering to others or to themselves or to nothing at all about various topics that he could not care less about. The line shortens, people order, lattes are sipped.

The bell on the door rings softly and a tall, lanky brunet boy (man? He looks no older than Hanschen) walks in, orders. For some reason, he catches Hanschen’s eye. 

Maybe it's the hair, or the way he holds himself. Maybe it's the eyes, dark brown and wide, like a doe’s, mostly fixated on the ground. 

Hanschen had seen too many boys who look like him, remembers when he'd seek them out, with their wide, questioning eyes and feathered hair. They made him think of pianos, of being fifteen and not knowing anything, of stolen kisses after school among grapevines. 

The brunet orders, his voice high and wavering. “And your name?” the cashier asks. So he was a newcomer. There were rarely newcomers here.

The boy answers softly, and Hanschen’s head jerks up. He hadn't said…

He had said his name, soft and shaky, unsure. He was in a new coffee shop and in an old city and they'd asked him his name and he answered, and the name was  _ Ernst _ . 

His leg starts bouncing up and down and he's having trouble breathing, and for some stupid reason he  _ needs  _ it to be Ernst, the same Ernst, the one who never left his mind for all these years…

The boy picks up his coffee and sits down at a table near Hanschen. Not remotely knowing what to do or how to handle this situation, Hanschen stands up slowly, makes his way over to the two-seat table, lingers there until the other boy looks up, and he knows now; this is definitely the same boy: the same wide eyes, same dark hair, same everything…

Hanschen speaks first, words tumbling out of his mouth so quick he doesn't know where in his mind they are coming from. 

“I…I know this is awfully rude of me to just...just, just sidle up to you like this as you probably have no memory of me and this is really just impolite and odd, but I saw you...ordering coffee and you said your name was Ernst? And mine is Hanschen and I'm sure you don't remember me but –”

Ernst's eyes get wide. “...Hanschen?” His voice is soft; so he  _ does  _ recognize him. 

“...Y-yeah. Can I…?” Hanschen points to the chair across from Ernst, and the other boy nods quickly. Hanchen sits down. His leg resumes shaking. 

What follows is a painfully awkward period of silence. Hanschen gets the feeling he is not wanted here, and rightfully so. “Should I just…?” He has work to get back to anyway, he figures. Ernst doesn't say anything, just takes a small sip of his coffee. 

“Well, maybe...if you'd like to talk later I can…or, rather, you can…” Hanschen grabs a napkin from the holder on the table and slips a pen from his pocket, scribbling down his address and phone number in a messy, quick scrawl. Ernst nods, and Hanschen walks away, trying his hardest not to cry. 

The rest of the day goes by remarkably quickly, one thought still burning in his mind:

He'd done something (many things, actually) absolutely idiotic. 

He knew Ernst already had his phone number, of course; he'd given it to him the day Hanchen had moved away, and Ernst had given Hanschen his own number in return. 

Hanschen had procrastinated texting him for months after they had parted, worrying about useless, petty things, starting messages he never sent. And the day he finally decided to text him…

_ The number you are trying to reach is unavailable. _

...Ernst had changed his phone number.

And it was completely logical of him to not update Hanschen on the change, he reasoned; one doesn’t send their new contact details to people they hadn’t contacted in months on end. Hanschen figured Ernst had forgotten about him.

Which would have been fine had Ernst not occupied every waking moment of his life.

From that day on, Hanschen had kept a journal, filled with things he never said to Ernst, things he’d forgotten to say, things he promised himself he would say if he ever saw Ernst again. He was certain he’d never see the boy again, of course, but if he did…

And then the coffee shop incident happened.

He hadn’t expected anything to come of it, expected the boy to be just another person he saw in public who looked too much like Ernst, reminded him too much of the boy who now occupied his dreams. 

But Ernst had said his name and it was  _ definitely him _ and Hanschen had felt like crying. Because he hadn’t seen the boy in years, and he had needed it to be Ernst, needed it to be  _ real _ so incredibly bad…

Something happens when you pretend not to have emotions, and Hanschen had figured, that moment in the coffee shop, that he supposed it was this.

So now he’s pacing around his apartment, wondering if the lunchtime fiasco had actually even occurred when his buzzer rings. 

Hanschen lets whoever it is in and two minutes later there’s a knock at his door. 

“It’s open,” he manages. Ernst pushes open the door, standing in the doorway looking incredibly out-of-place. Neither of them talk for too long.

Hanschen clears his throat. “Um. Thank you for...thank you for coming, I...I didn’t think you would actually…”

“It’s okay.” Ernst is looking down and Hanschen realizes for the first time that he really has not changed after all these years.

“Well, you can...come in, of course; I’m sorry, I forgot to tidy up, I…” Hanschen trails off. What was there to say? There are so many things he wants to say, of course, standing in that doorway looking at Ernst ‒  _ really _ looking at him for the first time after all of this ‒ but he knows, somewhere in the back of his mind, knows that he could never say them out loud.

And he’s back his old self again, he realizes. He’s smirking like a maniac, he’s standing up straighter; telling too many nonverbal lies to Ernst and to himself.

But this is the only way Ernst knows him to be: smirking, untouchable Hanschen. Nothing like the way he’d been acting these past few years.

Besides, if he lets these walls down Ernst will run away, he reasons. If he lets him know how much he needs him… 

“I was just...well, I was just making dinner when you buzzed in, um, if you’d like to stay…”

“Yeah, I’d like that.” Ernst’s responses have been nothing but short and snippy this whole day: one-syllable things; nothing like how he used to talk. Hanschen had it down in a journal somewhere that the boy used to paint with words, talk about how he wanted to be a pastor when he grew up.

Hanschen wonders what he actually grew up to be.

“So,” Hanschen started, making his way over to the kitchen, “I guess it’d be...nice to...reintroduce ourselves? What...what have you been doing?”

Ernst lingers at the kitchen table, staring a hole in the wood until Hanschen invites him to sit down. He hears the squeak of the chair as he resumes cooking. “Well, I’ve been...I’ve been doing some, well, some painting. I, um...I guess one could say I’m an artist?”

“Oh. That’s...that’s nice. I remember you used to like painting when we were in school, right?” Hanschen looks back and Ernst nods, soon resuming his hole-staring. When they were younger, Ernst had painted beautiful pictures in the art class he took outside of school. One day he brought one in to show to the nuns, and something about it ‒ Hanschen doesn’t remember what anymore ‒ had made the women shake their heads and mutter.

The adults at Catholic schools often did a lot of muttering.

They did the most, of course, the day Ernst and Hanschen were found out, the headmaster angrily storming down to the schoolyard to find the two boys holding hands…

“Yeah, I did. I loved it, actually.” Ernst’s comment shakes Hanschen from his thoughts. “And you? What do you do?”

“I’m a lawyer,” Hanschen says, and Ernst makes a sound of faint surprise. “I do mostly civil cases right now; car things and the like.”

The two chat amicably while Hanschen continues to cook, Ernst eventually leaving his spot at the table to walk over next to him. “Is there anything I can help with? I’m not the best cook myself, but I can clean things, if you like.”

Hanschen shakes his head. “No, you’re fine. You’re my guest.” He looks Ernst in the eyes, and the brunet blinks slowly. “What?”

“Nothing, you just...sounded different right there. Your voice, it got…” Ernst makes a vague gesture that seems to indicate the evident softening of Hanschen’s timbre. 

“Oh. Did my walls come down?” He asks slyly, slipping back into his old poise like it’s an ill-fitting glove. Ernst doesn’t laugh, just walks back to his place at the table. Hanschen takes two plates from a cabinet and serves the food silently. He sits across from Ernst and starts to eat.

Hanschen is about to say something more about the incident when Ernst decides to speak up. “Want to tell me what happened back there?”

He looks in Ernst’s eyes, and, no matter how much he tries, all he can see is the face of the boy he used to have, used to be able to touch and hold, the face of the boy he took for granted. Hanschen looks at his plate as a means of trying to concentrate.

“I suppose...you could say...I suppose you could say that the way I usually act is not…” No. That’s a lie, he reminds himself. Around everyone else he’s Sassy Hanschen, Unlovable Hanschen. With Ernst it’s always different. Goddamn, why does it always have to be  _ different _ ?

“It’s...not the same. With you. I mean, it used to be. The same, I mean. It used to be the same. But then you...well, no,  _ I _ …” Hanschen sighs. “We fell apart. I left. We got caught. Whatever you want to say happened all those years ago happened and all of a sudden I couldn’t stop thinking about you and it just became  _ different  _ with you. Or maybe it always was and I only noticed it once you’d...once  _ I’d _ left. And I left, and I didn’t talk to you, and it was because I was...I was scared to get close to you. And that’s the worst excuse you’ve ever heard, I know, but...I was afraid that if I got too close, too affectionate, too…” Hanschen mimics the hand gesture Ernst had used minutes before. “...too  _ whatever _ , you’d leave. But then it was too late. And I guess...I guess I’m sorry.”

Hanschen looks up and this time Ernst is looking down at his food, and he realizes he’s made a big mistake. He has the sudden urge to apologize for everything he’s ever done, for every time he’s ever tried to get close to Ernst, because it’s been too long and Ernst has most definitely moved on so  _ why can’t he _ ? Feelings, always getting in the way. He hates them.

And then Ernst looks him in the eyes and they’re both crying and Hanschen doesn’t know why, knowing only that he  _ can’t believe _ that Ernst is here, in front of him, sitting there, the thing he’d wanted for years and years and  _ years _ and now it’s happening and he very well might have fucked the whole thing up, but…

Ernst is looking at him like he used to all those years ago, when it seemed that all they had to worry about was being home before dark…

“Stand up.” 

“Sorry...what?”

Ernst smiles and Hanschen feels himself starting to cry again. “Stand up.” Hanschen does so, Ernst following suit. He walks the short distance of the table up to Hanschen, not knowing remotely what’s happening until Ernst leans in and kisses him, and now Hanschen’s  _ really _ crying, crying and smiling and kissing and kissing and  _ kissing _ , because only yesterday he could swear that this was never something that he could remotely hope for, something that would never happen again, but somehow it  _ did _ and here he is and he can’t stop crying…

Ernst pulls away and everything stops. “I...I’m sorry,” he says, his eyes darting around the room like he’s afraid something’s going to pounce on him. “I shouldn’t have...I should go, I should…”

“Wait.” Hanschen grabs Ernst’s hands in his own, wondering how on earth he was lucky enough to get this boy back. “Can...can you stay? The night? The...second bedroom is used as my office but I’m not sure we’ll need it…?” Hanschen wraps his arms around Ernst’s waist. “D’you think we can try again?”

And Ernst smiles, nodding down to the ground, and plants another kiss on Hanschen’s lips. “Yeah,” he whispers. “I’d love that.”

So Ernst stays the night, and Hanschen wakes up the next morning in his boxers unsure of what happened.

It could have been a dream, he reasons so as not to get his hopes up, staring daggers out the window at any attempt to avoid looking at the (possibly empty?) other side of the bed.

But Ernst sits up and kisses Hanschen on the neck, and Hanschen feels a rare smile threatening to split his face open. He hops out of bed, reaching for the journal he’d regarded for years as cheesy and disgusting, full of letter after letter saying all the things he’d never said. Some pages were filled to the brim with uneven script, long, winding notes about love and emotion and apologies. Other passages were merely short sentences, the feeling in them filling up the page enough. Hanschen nervously passes the leather-bound book to Ernst.

“What’s this?”

“It’s…um.” He looks down. “All the stuff I never said. Last time. This time, I...I figured I’d get it out of the way first.”

Ernst thumbs through the journal, tears welling in his eyes after each page is turned. The last page is a mere two sentences, a passage written at two in the morning after a particularly vivid dream of palms and lips and vineyards.

_ “I never told you I loved you. _

_ I’m telling you now.” _

The book closes with a small noise, and, for the second time in under twenty-four hours, the two boys are crying into each other again. 

“You meant that? All of that?” 

Hanschen gives a small nod. “You never left my mind for a second.”

A soft smile from Ernst. “And you mine.”

The book between them, the two kissed again, like this was goodbye.

But Hanschen knew it wasn’t; it never would be.

No, not this time.

**Author's Note:**

> is this me procrastinating on chapter 4 of laws of detachment? yes
> 
> do i care? a little bit, yes
> 
> but i'm also v lazy so
> 
> i'm sorry. i am working on it. i promise


End file.
